In February this year, Indian filmmaker Ananth Mahadevan walked into the film censor board’s office confidently, hoping for a swift certification process. After all, he believed his film was “safe” enough to pass the censorship test — no sex, no gore, no profanity, and no Bollywood innuendo. “Phule” is a reverential tale of anti-caste reformers Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule, two figures so celebrated that they routinely appear in school textbooks and on posters adorning the walls of the very government office tasked with certifying them. He even planned a release on Jyotirao Phule’s birth anniversary (April 11).
And yet, the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) panicked.
The CBFC’s examining committee suggested “routine edits” — delete some dialogue here, replace the visuals there. Then silence. A second screening by the revising committee — bureaucratic scrutiny masked as due diligence — followed to ensure that the original committee “had not missed out on anything.”
It then dawned on Mahadevan that the movie was not as “safe” after all. “Phule’s” uncompromising critique of the caste system, he figured, was too provocative for India’s current political climate.
A member of the Brahmin community (perceived as the most elite of all social classes) watched the trailer — not the film — and complained to the CBFC’s CEO, who then redirected his grievance to Mahadevan, instead of defending the filmmaker. “I was negotiating the fate of my film with a stranger offended by a two-minute promo,” Mahadevan told IndieWire.
The CBFC later handed over its most bizarre request: replace every use of the word “caste” in the English subtitles with its Sanskrit equivalent term “varna.”
“I couldn’t help but laugh,” he said. “What would ‘varna’ mean to an English-speaking audience? If a character says ‘lower caste’ in a scene, CBFC insisted on inserting ‘lower varna’ in the subtitle — that makes no sense,” the director said.
After incorporating a laundry list of changes, when he was asked to submit historical documentation to “validate” the film’s events, it almost felt too futile to resist. “For a PHD thesis, why not?” Mahadevan smirks. “But for a feature film?”
By the time the certificate arrived, he had missed his symbolic release date.
For those unfamiliar, CBFC is India’s statutory government-held film-certifying body, which, unlike the MPA in the U.S. (which classifies films based on age suitability), has the authority to demand cuts, mute dialogues, blur images, or even delay a release.
One would presume that CBFC would not spend a year scrutinizing a regional indie movie by a first-time filmmaker. “Wrong,” said Harshad Nalawade, who submitted his political drama “Follower” in early 2024 for certification; the movie was certified only in March 2025. “Follower” is set in a linguistically divisive border town of Belgaum, which has been a cause of conflict between the two Indian states of Karnataka and Maharashtra. The filmmaker’s own hometown offered the perfect lens to highlight political volatility.
After the first screening, he was told that the film would need clearance from “higher-ups.” Unfortunately, the timing coincided with the April 2024 general elections, subjecting the film to further scrutiny. The most outrageous request was the board’s insistence on removing references to words “Marathi” and “Kannada” — two languages, native to Maharashtra and Karnataka, respectively — driving the very conflict in the film.
“If I remove the linguistic identifiers, what remains of the scene?” said an exasperated Nalawade.
The requests eventually kept spiralling: mute the name of the historical king, modify the image of the political flag, and submit the script for review. After months of creative compromise, the certificate arrived. And then the final twist: the film was not screened in Belgaum (the movie’s very setting) owing to unrest, with theaters reportedly being vandalized.
“My battle with the board is not about muted words,” Nalawade said. “It is about a system that silences narratives that do not complement the ruling party’s,” he said. Movies framing the enemy as an outsider from foreign countries are widely celebrated, he said. “However, when political films turn the lens inward, within India itself, an alarm goes off.”
And this is evident across India’s movie ecosystem.
“The Kerala Story,” which exaggerated data on religious conversions, not only received state backing despite fact-checkers debunking its authenticity, but also won Best Director from a jury appointed by a government body at the 2025 National Film Awards. “The Kashmir Files,” universally panned for stoking anti-Muslim sentiment, was also endorsed by government officials, with its director even serving as a CBFC board member.
Meanwhile, despite making the shortlist as the UK’s official entry for the Best International Feature film at the 2025 Oscars, the caste-based police procedural drama “Santosh” was ordered cuts so extreme that director Sandhya Suri called it “impossible.” As a result, a film about India, starring an Indian cast, will not be seen by the Indian public. Its OTT (over-the-top streaming) debut on Lionsgate Play in October 2025 was also withheld — a signal that censorship could just be spilling over to platforms.
The Indian censorship regime doesn’t always prefer to block films entirely — when it can bleed them instead — a rewritten subtitle here, a deleted scene there, a muted reference, a delayed certificate, a second screening. Any filmmaker who has been a part of the censorship ceasefire will tell you that the C in CBFC no longer stands for certification, but something more sinister.
And even the most celebrated filmmaker isn’t spared. Executive-produced by Martin Scorsese, Neeraj Ghaywan’s “Homebound” — the Indian entry for the Best International Feature Film for the 98th Academy Awards — was cleared for release after a long list of “deletions,” a word that appears frequently on its CBFC certificate. Based on a New York Times article by journalist Basharat Peer, it follows two friends, one Dalit, one Muslim, navigating daily oppression and trying to escape the city, only to be forced to make a gruelling return home during the Covid-19 lockdown.
According to the board’s documentation, the committee insisted on 11 key modifications, including a cricket match sequence trimmed by 32 seconds — a moment that might be entertaining otherwise in Bollywood movies, but appears tense here, given the central character’s religion. Another change involved modifying the “visual of the passing car” during a scene in which the two lead characters are walking on a deserted road, asking for help. In the international cut, the vehicle, which did not stop, has a red beacon light on top — a detail that conveys the apathy of state authorities during the migrant exodus. A source close to the production said that such changes rewrote the essence of pivotal scenes depicting social realities. If a film chosen to represent India on the global stage can be rescripted to suit the board’s sentiments before its release, what does the future hold for bold storytelling?
And this year, the CBFC did something stealthier. It shut down public access to certificates, taking away eight years of cut lists in a single software update.
Until May of this year, Indian filmgoers could publicly access the trail of cuts their favorite movies had endured. Since 2017, CBFC certificates, flashed before the beginning of any film and displayed on theater premises, have carried a QR code. Scan one, and you are directed to e-CinePramaan — the board’s digital certification portal created for logistical purposes — where the film’s cut list is visible.
The site was never designed to be a public archive — even though the Cinematograph Act mandates that these certificates be published in the Gazette — but it had a unique flaw: the URLs for each certificate were sequential.
Change the numbers at the end, and a user could browse India’s censorship history — not through a browsable interface, but trial and error. Then, the portal went “under maintenance,” only to reappear a month later with the sequential numbers now replaced by random strings of letters and digits, which could not be decoded. The accidental loophole was now shut, and the only window into data, which should have been legally public in the first place, was closed.
But two 20-something Bengaluru-based developers may just have pre-empted this possible closure. In December 2024, Aman Bhargava and Vivek Matthew began writing scripts to crawl through the e-CinePramaan’s sequential URLs. The idea was simple: create CBFC Watch, the first public, searchable database of every modification demanded by the board from 2017 to 2025. To date, the duo has already stacked up 100,000 modifications from nearly 18,000 films.
“Maybe it is a coincidence the update happened after we started collating this data; perhaps it isn’t,” said Bhargava. “But this is happening across most levels of transparency, especially with things to do with the state.”
Matthew, who archived entire webpages before the site went down, added, “The government takes data from its citizens without informing them all the time. So, when an opportunity to download and store that information came up, why not use it?”
“The bigger problem isn’t only the cuts,” Matthew added, “It is the arbitrary nature of these cuts. Arbitrary censorship becomes the second layer of censorship.”
And they have data to prove that the pattern of cuts is more alarming than the volume.
One CBFC Watch chart breaks down 100,000-plus modifications by category — profanity sits at the top with 21,789 modifications alongside violence at 21,142 cuts. At the bottom, political and religious edits at 2,621 and 2,589 changes, respectively, which they believe are more concerning.
“Muting politician names or removal of caste-related terms rewrites meaning. In comparison, the most frequent interventions are also the most superficial,” said Bhargava.
Another graph tracking changes with a three-month moving average from 2017 to 2025 shows sharp spikes in religious and political modifications, sometimes doubling relative to baseline, followed by sudden dips.
“Does the downward trend in political censorship indicate a more lenient Board, or that less filmmakers are taking the non-mainstream route?” Bhargava asked. It is this silence that no graph can depict — the films that never got made because filmmakers knew it would offend the board.
CBFC Watch is not an anti-censorship manifesto. It just lets data do all the talking. As Bhargava puts it, “A public record is necessary to verify if similar content is being treated consistently. If one film is allowed to show a specific political reality, another film should be able to do the same. Removing public records makes that conversation impossible.”
Filmmaker Rahul Dholakia takes us back nearly two decades to reveal the CBFC’s build-up to the fear-mongering environment that we see today. His 2007 English-language film “Parzania,” based on a true story from the 2002 communal riots of Gujarat, was never released in the very state it was set in, now ruled by the same party that governs India today.
Dholakia, whose scars are still fresh, said, “It’s difficult to release a film that’s not in agreement with the majority’s narrative.” He was made to cut a few crucial scenes perceived as “too gory” or “too brutal.” By the time CBFC cleared the film, exhibitors and distributors from the state backed out, fearing political backlash.
Two decades later, “L2: Empuraan” (2025) not only faced the wrath of censorship but also right-wing backlash, and it voluntarily made 24 cuts, trimming footage that appeared eerily similar to the 2002 Gujarat riots. Two decades later, Dholakia feels the situation has turned insidious. “The crippling anxiety of offending sentiments compels filmmakers to pre-emptively self-censor at the scripting stage itself, long before the CBFC wields its scissors,” added Dholakia.
Dholakia, who is currently working on a Netflix film based on India’s first elections, explains that he is being “very, very careful. Because anyone, anytime, can take offense.”
While Mahadevan, Nalawade, and Dholakia battled state censorship, filmmaker Dibakar Banerjee experienced a different censor: OTT. But the outcome was just as chilling.
Banerjee’s “Tees” — a portrait of three generations of Kashmiri Muslims — has been indefinitely shelved by Netflix since 2022, the very platform that funded it. “Now is not the right time,” Netflix executives told him. The trigger, he believes, was the controversy surrounding Amazon Prime Video’s political web series “Tandav,” which was rife with criminal complaints over scenes with religious undertones. Platforms were spooked.
“The doors that were open to you earlier are now closed as a result of nothing but what you are writing or making,” Banerjee said. “When a show is slapped with lawsuits, suddenly all filmmakers feel the ‘pointy end of the law.’ You start navigating fear, and self-censorship seems like the easy way out.”
Banerjee sees a systemic alignment when algorithm-chasing corporate honchos quietly comply with governments taking back narrative control. “The corporate forces that fund filmmaking are really doing it for profit and monopolizing the attention economy. When you collude with a government, your powers increase hugely. The government then says, ‘We will allow you this as long as you suppress that’. And many comply.”
Banerjee is still hopeful that the public will get to watch “Tees” someday. Until then, its erasure is proof that decision-makers in a swanky boardroom can be as nervous as those in a government office.
“Let’s make a ‘safe’ film” — a family entertainment, romcom, or simply a comedy of errors featuring three men in a midlife crisis seeking love outside of marriage — is the common sentiment among filmmakers who feel the fight with the censor board is not worth the effort or time. But not everyone is cracking under pressure. Their art reveals exactly what the state fears most: politically charged storytelling that can shift public discourse. But these filmmakers know that when those in power fear a story, that story must be told.
